Chappie director Neill Blomkamp caused a bit of a celebration and/or uproar yesterday when he claimed that the Alien sequel he’s developing at Fox would be a followup to Aliens. At the time he said, “I want this film to feel like it is literally the genetic sibling of Aliens, so it’s Alien, Aliens and then this film.” Many fans took this as a sign that Blomkamp’s film would ignore or rewrite the canon of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. It turns out that the internet sort of jumped to conclusions on this thing, as it often does, and now Blomkamp has clarified his stamp a little.

In the video with AlloCine below, he states that it’s not at all his intent to “undo” those two films, just that he likes Alien and Aliens the best and wants his film more closely aligned with those two entries:

“My favorites are the first two movies. So I want to make a film that’s connected to Alien and Aliens. That’s my goal. I’m not trying to undo Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection, I just want it to be connected to Alien and Aliens.”

Sigourney Weaver, also featured in the video, adds:

“I always wanted to complete this story and it wasn’t really until Neill and I started talking that I said, ‘this is why we waited however many years its been.'”

It does sound like their hearts are in the right place. I still don’t know quite how they’ll make the concept art he shared fit into that, but they have several years to figure all of this out while Ridley Scott goes ahead with Prometheus 2. What I don’t want is to have the whole thing systematically spoiled for me over the next four years or so leading up to its release. I guess I’ll have to unplug the internet until then.